What does it mean to write truth into literature? In recent decades, books that are largely autobiographical but also explicitly include fictional elements have become a very popular genre in Scandinavia. It’s a conversation that crosses borders and has many names, from “reality literature” in Norway and Sweden (or sometimes “witness literature”) to “autofiction” in Denmark. More and more authors from Scandinavian countries are working in this genre, taking inspiration from authors like Tove Ditlevsen and her The Copenhagen Trilogy and penning highly lauded literary work based on their lived experiences. Recent examples include Andrev Walden’s Bloody Awful in Different Ways, Vigdis Hjorth’s Is Mother Dead and Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle. Though these titles differ in many ways, they also share much in common. If “reality literature” has one unifying claim, it is that writing should bring us closer to truth. But truth in literature is never simple and in autofiction two approaches matter: one based on fact, and one based on feeling. One insists that truth is found in lived experience backed up by historical records and documents; the other suggests that creative reconstructions can produce a truth of their own.
Norwegian poet, playwright, and novelist Niels Fredrik Dahl—sadly not yet translated into English—enters this conversation with a diptych of sorts, consisting of Mor om natten (2017) and Fars rygg (2023), the latter of which was awarded the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 2024. In these two autofictional works, he returns to the silences, absences, and fractures in his family history—first, in a portrait of a mother who battles depression, and later in a reconstruction of his father’s childhood before, during, and after World War II. Of course, as with most good family portraits, these books are also a portrait of the author himself, as a child growing up with his mother’s sadness and a father he never quite knew, and as an adult, dealing with a profound sense of loneliness. By shifting between autofiction’s two modes across his two works, Dahl demonstrates that truth in literature is never a stable concept, but always a matter of perspective and curation.
Mor om natten is the first of Dahl’s two books that delve into the lives and psyches of his parents. The title, translated roughly as ”Mother at Night,“ is a reference to the so-called “night book”—a diary of sorts, penned during restless nights throughout her adult life and filled with all her darkness—that the author’s mother leaves in his care, to do with what he pleases. Or so the narrator claims.
It is a deeply personal and elegiac novel. The mother’s diary is made up of confessional, unsent entries written to her psychiatrist, revealing her inner life and depression in ways she never spoke aloud. The narrating I initially resists the gift, a manifestation of the connection that the mother believes exists between herself and her son. Why, he wonders, won’t she give the book to one of his siblings instead? “Because I think you would understand,” is the mother’s reply from her hospital bed. Years after her passing, he finally opens it, initiating this work of memory, mourning, and reconciliation.
The narrative, told in first person by this stand-in Dahl, moves back and forth in time, interweaving glimpses of the mother’s childhood in Norway during World War II, her struggle with migraines and depression after the passing of her sister, and Dahl’s own youth, alcohol use as an adult, failed relationships, and eventual fatherhood. In its reflections on a parent’s death and its themes of childhood and alcohol use, it echoes Knausgård’s My Struggle and Hjorth’s Will and Testament, with a style of its own.
Dahl’s writing is not as rancorous as Hjorth’s, nor as sweeping as Knausgård’s. Instead, it is spare and often purposefully repetitive; his is a softly pondering, searching style. He sees his mother in fragmented moments, painting her portrait in profile, never head on. Now, as an adult and through the process of writing, he can see the outlines of the pain she carried and the trauma from the war much more clearly; all things a child cannot fathom about their parents, nonetheless absorbed in a process of osmosis. He quietly reconstructs her as both the mother he knew and a woman he hardly understood. In the process, he comes closer to understanding his own loneliness as a reflection of the home he grew up in.
Throughout Mor om natten, the narrator references his own writing process, which Dahl himself has described as arduous in interviews. Clearing out the house after his mother’s passing, he comes across drawings and photographs that shed light on his father’s childhood, and it is this story he initially thinks he must write. But the project stalls as he fails to find the right entry point, and instead he begins to write about his mother, with the encouragement of his spouse, who we can only assume is a reference to Dahl’s own, author and journalist Linn Ullmann. Despite this, the father’s presence looms large already in Mor om natten, as Dahl works his way towards what will eventually become the second half of this pair of parental portraits.
Six years later, in Fars rygg (Father’s Back), it seems he is finally ready to tell his father’s story. Unlike the story of his mother, which is fragmentary and stylistically more ephemeral, here Dahl tries to reconstruct a precise chronology of his father’s life, told from the same first-person narrator as in Mor om natten. In doing so, he paints a tender picture of a profoundly lonely boy, longing for home and connection. The father spends much of his younger years friendless at a house in Alexandria, where his father is a judge at the international court during the inter-war years, being homeschooled by his increasingly distant mother. Every summer, they go “home” to Norway, a country the boy is supposed to feel an affinity for, but where he has almost always been just a visitor. Then, at thirteen, he is dropped off to live with strangers and start school in Norway. It is not until he enrolls in an international boarding school in Geneva, when he is fifteen, that he makes his first friends. But this too is short-lived, as war breaks out and he is sent back “home.”
In terms of structure, Fars rygg reads much more like a classic coming-of-age story than Mor om natten. Springboarding off of letters, drawings, and photographs left behind, Dahl uses his imagination to fill in the gaps in search of a father he never quite felt close to: “I’m looking for my father. He’s been dead for fourteen years now, and yet I’m still looking for him.”
In these two intimate portraits, Mor om natten and Fars rygg, Dahl experiments with different modes of truth-telling. Despite having access to his mother’s diary, the first is diffuse, almost impressionistic: truth emerges in half‑glimpses, reconstructed from memory and silence as much as from the factual records he possesses. The second is more linear, following a plausible, roughly chronological arc through the father’s childhood. Form places Fars rygg emotionally closer to fiction, while presenting itself as a historical record of his father’s childhood and Europe at the eve of war. At the same time, Dahl acknowledges that he couldn’t possibly have access to these scenes with such accuracy and detail. He even notes that many of the photos he found lead to more questions than answers. Why, for instance, do his father and grandfather look so chummy together in the 1930s, when it seems they hardly spent any time together and, indeed, the grandfather sent his son away to live with strangers? “Perhaps the photographs are lying, or perhaps,” Dahl says, “I’m lying.”
Here, autofiction gives Dahl, like his Scandinavian colleagues, the leeway to play with truth without abandoning it by boldly setting up camp right on the line between fact and fiction. Rather than concealing facts, writers like Dahl, Hjorth, and Knausgård place gaps and fractures at the center of the text, commenting on them directly and inviting the reader to consider where that line is drawn. They are not coy about it: Dahl will often turn the gaze back onto himself in the narrative, letting the reader know that he knows that they know that it’s all just a version of the truth. Early in Fars rygg, he precedes any criticism or claims of making things up: “This story is just as true as any other way to tell any other story. Just as true and untrue. Or, to rephrase: It is true. But only here. Only as I tell it.” He does not claim to have written a testimony but a fractured reconstruction, self-consciously admitting that memory is fallible and invention unavoidable. Dahl never disguises his books’ fictional bent; he instead makes it part of the truth-telling: “I’m trying to see father’s loneliness, but I have to filter it, or calibrate it, through the lens of my own loneliness. After all, I’m writing this story with the belief that loneliness can be inherited.”
This way of writing suggests that truth in literature is less about precision than about resonance. Dahl does not claim to deliver the past “as it was,” but to write a version of it that feels true, that captures what could not otherwise be said. With this, we might recast the paradox at the heart of autofiction as follows: fiction, far from concealing truth, may be the only tool sharp enough to achieve this.
Ultimately, these familial portraits are not told with documentary precision. These are not exactly memoirs. Instead, Dahl turns to fiction, where memory is fallible and imagination just as truthful as fact, to create a self that is both real and invented. His work insists that writing can never deliver the whole truth of another life, yet it can trace the contours and tell a version of the truth; one that is just as true and real as any other, but which may only exist on the page. For Dahl, this double movement—toward truth and toward self-creation—seems to be the very essence of writing. To write is not to fix the past in place once and for all, but to reconstruct it, to test it, and inhabit it. In that process, he doesn’t just recover fragments of his parents’ lives; he makes himself visible to himself.
Linnea Gradin is a freelance writer from Sweden, currently based in South Korea. She holds an MPhil in the Sociology of Marginality and Exclusion from the University of Cambridge and has always been interested in matters of representation, particularly in literature. She has also studied Publishing Studies at Lund University and as a writer and the editor of Reedsy’s freelancer blog, she has worked together with some of the industry’s top professionals to organize insightful webinars, develop resources to make publishing more accessible, and write about everything writing and publishing related, from how to become a proofreader to whether you need a translator certificate to be a good literary translator. Catch some of her book reviews here and here.
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